When I first started this blog, I did it for my family and for myself. I had a few objectives with it. First, I wanted to be able to chronicle my experiences in film school so that my family back home could follow along. For my family that might be reading this, thanks so much for following along. Second, as I was just starting film school and the next chapter of my life, I wanted a medium to be able to pour out my thoughts and ideas as they were developing. That's why I called it Cinelosophy - I imagined that this blog could be an interesting combination of my journey studying cinema and my own personal philosophies. For a time, I think that was true. But, as time went on, I began to use this blog for school. Our professors wanted us to blog our experiences, and I already had a blog. Perfect! Because of that, the blog migrated more and more towards the cinema studies side of things, and my personal thoughts and opinions on things began slipping through the cracks.
Through this process, I learned a lot. For starters, I learned that I have a hard time breaking consistency, even when I should. For example, this summer we were assigned to keep a journal/blog of our work through our Advanced Compositing class. You might have seen the Advanced Compositing posts where I blogged about driving to the beach to shoot my GoPro footage or shooting green screen plates in the sound stage. The goal behind these assignments were to keep professional blog posts chronicling our experience in this class. However, since this was more of a personal and informal blog, I felt a sense of obligation to keep the tone consistent. I couldn't just keep it a professional post, it had to feel like my post. This might not seem like a bad thing - of course I should be keeping my personality in my posts! But that leads me to the second thing I learned: I learned that I'm not a huge fan of blogging about more personal things. I learned that I enjoyed blogging about the "cinema" much more than I enjoyed blogging about the "philosophy." Maybe this will change over time, but right now that's where I stand. I think that my effort to keep this blog inherently "Cinelosophy" while also transitioning into a more professional blog ended up hurting my blog posts in the long run. Instead of being clear and concise, they just kind of existed, rambling on in one way or the other.
The sub par quality of my posts indirectly led to a pretty big experience for me: the first C of my entire life. Throughout all of middle and high school I was a straight A student. I held myself to the highest standards. In college, that changed a little. My freshman year I found that college was more challenging, especially when the grading scale changed and 90-94 was a B in several of my classes. Nonetheless, I kept my grades extremely high and finished my first year with a 3.86 GPA. The pattern continued into film school. I finished my first year with all A's with the occasional A- or B+. This Summer in my advanced compositing class, I received my first ever C. At first I was really upset and even angry. I thought the grading scale was unfair, I thought I couldn't possibly be wrong. But after mulling it over for a night, I realized that I deserved the C. And this was a huge revelation for me. For the first time ever, there was a class that I didn't put the effort into. There's no easy way to say it. I just didn't try very hard. When I accepted this reality, I really put a lot of thought into it, reflecting on the class, what went wrong, and where I could have done better. There are so many excuses I could make, and most of them I found myself making! The biggest excuse was that I was putting more of my effort into my directing class and my thesis development class. But upon reflection, I was transported back to high school and my hugely influential basketball coaches, Coaches Paul and Drew Strauch. The Strauch's didn't tolerate a lack of effort, and they especially didn't tolerate excuses. I could give dozens of examples, but time and time again the Strauch's showed me that effort isn't finite. You don't have "only so much" effort that you have to divide between tasks. The Strauch's taught me that while time might be finite, effort is a choice. And when I thought about that, I hated the fact that I let this class slip away from me over the summer. Do I feel like there were things out of my control that made this class especially difficult for me? Yes, absolutely. But sports are no different. Players would get injured, other teams got lucky from time to time, and refs would make bad calls - all out of my control. But if each and every player didn't stand back up and give 110%, we were going to lose the game. Period. Sometimes, you give 110% and lose the game anyway. But at least you knew you tried your best, and that spirit would carry over into the next practice and create a hunger for victory in the next game: a victory that would give you a chance to redeem yourself. I didn't give this class my best, and recognizing that has really torn me apart. So to my professors: I truly thank you for giving me this C. Really. It's a strange thing to say but I mean it. It's the kick in the pants I needed to get myself back on track. And now I feel that hunger for victory again. I feel like I can redeem myself.
So here I am, with just over one semester left in college before I graduate, and now more determined than ever to give everything I do 110%. Beyond experiencing the first C of my life, I went through a series of challenges through this summer and into this fall, and I think I have grown because of each one of them. Regarding the blog, I've made some decisions based on what I've learned. As graduation grows nearer, I believe it's time to steer my blog in a more professional and artistic direction. I think I need to retool the blog to be more of an evolving portfolio as opposed to a blog full of personal thoughts on my experiences. Moreover, I want to move the blog in a more visual direction. If it's to be more professionally focused and portfolio oriented, I think the blog should be much less wordy and much more visual. As a filmmaker, I am trained to tell visual stories. Why should my blog be anything different? With this new direction in mind, I think it will be best to archive this blog and begin a new one. I plan on taking the opportunity to try a new blog platform that will be more visually friendly. Blogger has been great, but in my two years of using it I have discovered that it's really aimed at writers; I have little to no customization over the visual components, so migrating to a new platform is the way for me to go.
Maybe I'll occasionally come back and post something a bit more personal here, but at the moment I don't really plan on it. So if you've actually been following my blog, I hope you'll join me at my new one. It will be something different, but it will still be there. Blogger, so long for now. Maybe I'll be back. Someday.
You can find my new blog at austinbaur.wordpress.com.
Thanks for reading,
Austin
